Reflections On Constructing Websites With Notepad

Gone are the days when the plainest of text editors, Notepad, discreetly lodged in the Start > Programs > Accessories menu of a Microsoft Windows-operated machine, flourished as the quill of our website creation. That was a decade ago, when we were almost high school students, at the flux of beepers/pagers fading (I recall phoning messages to operators, taking it as good opportunity to practice conversational English) and mobile phones and text messaging gaining ground (hence, the incubation of the jejemon). A side stream fashion of that time was crafting personal websites, a hobby oftentimes fueled by an irresistible liking to “peacock” our lives – a common but sometimes taboo incident of human nature, as confirmed by our pervasive taste for Facebook, Friendster, Twitter and the like, today.

Armed with just a sufferable know-how of HTML encoding, we embarked for hours on end typing line after line, experimenting with tags here and there, and saving and resaving like clockwork, to check if our masterpieces were all in order and exactly as pictured in mind. Our websites then was a constant work in progress into which every fresh idea, learning of interest, or object of curiosity was shared, serving pretty much the same purposes as our present existence and identities on Facebook.

But unlike in styling and breathing life into one’s Facebook page with infusions of our personality, made easily manageable for all with the prevalence of prompts and templates; then, in order to arrive at the same result, we had to learn a foreign language first, from the basics of HTML to the more complex CSS, which already proved incomprehensible for the weekend warrior that I was. Groping with HTML, with Notepad, and with a handful of HTML tutorial websites, was an arduous but gratifying endeavor – more gratifying than starting a Facebook account with but a few types and clicks – a sentiment perhaps best described by the proverbial, “mas masarap ang pinaghirapan”.

For today we are a culture of “instants”, of accomplishing more with less time, only rarely and but briefly pausing to appreciate the inestimable beauty of things “unfolding as it should” and in its right time as dictated by nature’s course. After all, to put it metaphorically, and if my nebulous appreciation of Einstein, confabulated or otherwise, is not altogether wrong, we age quicker travelling at speeds of light; and looking back at the movement from here to there and from then to now would all be just a hazy blur.

But then again, faster does not mean not better, and my attachment to Notepad lies in the same notions as that of rudimentary technology in which the human element played a greater part; and its product, such as the Pyramids, which while perhaps dwarfed by the architectural wonders of modern times, was built year after year, pylon by pylon, boulder by boulder, without even as simple as mortar, yet remains a spectacle that has sustained the test of transience wrought by time.

Raul S. Grapilon
Entry No. 12